In recent years, web-based systems such as Enterprise Information Portals have gained importance in many companies. Such systems integrate, as a single point of access, various applications and processes into one homogeneous user interface.
Today, such systems include a huge amount of content. They are no longer exclusively maintained by an IT department. Instead, Web 2.0 techniques are used increasingly, allowing user generated content to be added. These systems grow quickly and, often, in an uncoordinated way as different users possess different knowledge and expertise and obey to different mental models.
This continuous growth makes access to highly relevant information difficult. Users may need to find task- and role-specific information quickly, but face information overload and often feel lost in hyperspace.
Thus, users often miss out on resources that are potentially relevant to their tasks, simply because they never come across those resources. Users often obtain too much information that is not relevant to their current task, and it becomes cumbersome to find the right information and, hence, they do not obtain all the information that would be relevant.
The recent popularity of collaboration techniques on the Internet, particularly tagging and rating, provides new ways for both semantically describing Portal content as well as for reasoning about users' interests, preferences and context.
In this context, tagging is the process of assigning keywords (or metadata) to resources. A tag itself is “some” metadata associated to a resource. Tags themselves are non-hierarchical keywords taken from an uncontrolled vocabulary. In this context, a resource is an entity that is uniquely identifiable (addressable). Tags can add valuable meta information and even lightweight semantics to web resources.
Rating is the evaluation or assessment of something, in terms of quality (as with a critic rating a novel), quantity (as with an athlete being rated by his or her statistics), or some combination of both. That is, it is the process of assigning (e.g., numeric) “value” to resources indicating how much people “like” those resources. A rating itself is “some value” associated to a resource. Ratings themselves are chosen from an interval of possible “values” in which the one end of the interval usually refers to “dislike” and the other end of the interval refers to “like.”
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of this problem using basic structural components of a conventional hardware and software environment used for a conventional tagging-based method when searching for some content.
A web client 10 among a plurality of web clients cooperates with a web server 12 during a search for selected content. Tags 14 are used for characterizing the content. There are many resources 16A through 16N available for being accessed by the person conducting the search using the web client 10 with a respective Web Browser. The user may find the best suited content when the tags 14 are selective enough for the searching user.
A similar situation occurs to the user when he searches for content in a different web server as shown in FIG. 2.
Taranov et al (U.S. Pat. Pub. No. 2008/0189312), which is incorporated by reference, discloses a uniformly managed taxonomy system in order to manage vocabulary terms across heterogeneous or different resource domains. In this publication, such taxonomy system may implement a vocabulary management module in order to manage a taxonomy of formal and informal vocabulary terms organized in a hierarchical structure. Further, it is proposed to associate each vocabulary term with multiple resources from different resource domains and to store the resource associations or resource relationships in a central database. In this manner, a single managed taxonomy system may be used to manage the resource associations or resource relationships uniformly about source domains. Such a centralized management of taxonomy across heterogeneous systems provides a centralized and shared database of tags and their relationships, which may be used for various knowledge based applications such as classification applications, search applications, tagging applications, etc.
FIG. 2 illustrates a conventional embodiment in which a user (web client 10) may send a request specifying for example a certain tag (e.g., New York) and another tag (e.g., cheap hotels) to the taxonomy manager 20, which in turn processes the centralized taxonomy for these tags and forwards respective responses to all of the web server systems 12, namely 12A, 12B, 12C and 12D. Each of the systems 12 will respond to this forwarded request with, for example, a ranked list of hits from each of the respective server systems.
This conventional approach, however, cannot be used for state of the art behavior of communities in which each community member may upload his or her own contributions to a taxonomy system which exists in the web server system 12.